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To those not in the IT industry, what do you think programming is like? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

153 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've always been curious as to what "normal" people think programming is like. The wildest theory I've heard is "typing ones and zeroes" (I'm a software engineer)

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 10 months ago (1 children)

You guys talk to computers in the language of computers. You are trying to get the computer to do something you want. However the computer doesn't help you out, you have to tell it explicitly what to do down to the tinyist detail or it won't work and you will be sad.

To the outside observer this looks like typing gibberish and copying in chunks of more gibberish. With occasional swearing.

How'd I do? (I know very little about programming and computers, I've worked manual labor for something like 20 years.)

[–] [email protected] 8 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That's pretty much bang on.

You learn pretty fast that you're an idiot and yes, you can write something, read it back many times, and still be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Hunting that missing semicolon in 500 lines of code qq

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

With that one, at least your parser should crap itself right around where the error is. You probably just need to search engine the error message, and find the page every other noob has to. Then it won't take too long.

If your thing compiles but doesn't work, then the real fun begins. You're in the magical land of Turing completeness, where you hope the problem isn't unsolvable in your case, because it definitely is in general.